I Dreaded This Flight for Six Weeks. Here's the Hour by Hour of What Actually Worked.

Nine hours, a two year old, and the hour I gave up and handed over the iPad anyway.

I booked the flight in March and started worrying about it in April.

Not about the trip. About the nine hours. My youngest was two and a half, my oldest was four, and the last flight we did was three hours to see my sister and I spent most of it standing in the galley with a screaming toddler on my hip, apologizing to a flight attendant who kept telling me it was fine.

Nine hours is three of those, back to back, with nowhere to stand.

What everyone tells you to do

If you have googled this you already know the advice, because it is the same advice everywhere. Go to the dollar store. Buy a pile of little junk they have never seen. Wrap each one. Pull them out one at a time, roughly every thirty minutes, and let the unwrapping burn a few extra minutes.

I did all of it. I had a whole gift bag. I wrapped fourteen things at the kitchen table the night before like a lunatic.

And honestly? It works. For about ninety minutes.

Here is what nobody puts in the listicle. Ninety minutes of activities on a nine hour flight does not justify the bag you are now carrying through security with a stroller and a car seat and a backpack of snacks. Half of it ends up on the floor by hour two. And the small stuff, the little plastic bits, they go down between the seat and the wall and you spend the rest of the flight contorting yourself sideways trying to reach a rubber frog while your toddler screams about the rubber frog.

What I did differently this time

I brought one thing. Plus snacks, obviously, because I am not insane. But one activity instead of a bag of them.

It was a felt busy book I had bought months earlier and mostly used at home. It closes up like a little handbag with a carry handle, so it went in the seat pocket and stayed there. It is soft, so nothing rattled and nothing clunked on the tray table.

The pages we took were all stitched down, so there was nothing that could disappear down the side of a seat. Anything loose stayed at home. That was not clever planning on my part, it just turned out to be the thing that mattered most once we were up there.

The flight, hour by hour

Nothing came out. This is the one piece of advice I would actually fight someone over. The novelty of the plane itself is free entertainment and you should spend it before you spend anything else. We looked out the window, we watched the bags go up the belt, we said hello to the man in front. Snack at takeoff for his ears.

Still coasting on plane novelty and the drinks trolley. I did not touch the bag.

This is where it always used to fall apart for us. The window is boring now, the snack is gone, and he starts doing that thing where he pushes both feet against the seat in front.

This is where the busy book came out. Not before. Forty minutes, roughly, on the buckle page and the shoelace page, which is longer than anything in that gift bag would have bought me. He was not being entertained by it, he was working on it, and there is a difference you can see on their face.

He got bored of it. Of course he did, he is two. But here is the bit I did not expect: he flipped the page and there was a whole different thing waiting. Gears, then a zip, then the little clock. Each page bought me another stretch. That is the entire reason one item outlasted fourteen wrapped ones.

Nap. Twenty five minutes. I did not move a muscle.

iPad. Full screen, headphones on, two episodes back to back, and I have zero guilt about it. Travel days are travel days. I am not going to sit here and tell you I got nine hours out of a felt book, because you would know I was lying and you would stop reading.

What actually changed is that the iPad was hour six instead of hour one. On our last flight the tablet came out before the seatbelt sign went off, and by hour two he was done with it and had nothing left. This time I still had something in reserve, which is the whole game.

Snacks, the busy book again for the last stretch, and a lot of walking up and down the aisle with me. We landed. Nobody cried. I did not have to apologize to a single person, which after the last flight felt like winning a small award.

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What I would tell another mom before a long flight

Three things.

Do not open anything before hour two. The plane is the entertainment for the first stretch. Spending your good stuff at the gate is the most common mistake and I have made it twice.

The screen is not the enemy, the timing is. Hold it. Whatever you were going to give at hour one, give at hour five or six, and you will get more out of it.

One thing that lasts beats twenty that don't. Especially if it fits in a seat pocket and you are not spending the flight retrieving bits of it from under the row in front.

The question I get asked every time

Someone always asks if it is the same as the $25 ones. I can only tell you what I have seen. A friend brought one on our trip that had arrived flat packed with a sheet of velcro dots you stick on yourself, and by the second flight she was down two pieces and one of them was somewhere under the row behind us.

Ours is a Toddla one. It came ready to go and everything is stitched rather than glued, which on a plane turned out to be the only spec that mattered. The pages also detach, which is how my two ended up with half each on the drive home from the airport.

Turns out it wasn't just us

When I mentioned the flight afterwards, my DMs filled up with the same story. The Trustpilot page reads much the same:

For what it's worth, I checked before writing any of this: they're rated 'Great' on Trustpilot, 4.2 out of 5 from 700 something reviews.

If your flight is next week

Get whatever you are going to use into the house before you pack, not the night before, because it is worth letting them get familiar with it at home first. Half the reason mine sat still with it on the plane is that he already knew which page he liked.

They do a 30 day money back thing, so worst case you try it on your flight, it does nothing for your kid, and you send it back.

I cannot promise your hour two looks like my hour two. I can tell you I have already put it in the bag for the flight home at Christmas.

See the busy book we flew with

Savannah shares real family life with her two boys. This story features a product from Toddla.